The Daily Office is now in motion

Monday, February 20th, 2006

This is the start of the Daily Space with God journal. I’m starting the daily office exercises today. I missed the first one which was the morning liturgy and found that it was very difficult to get going. I’m also trying out the voice recorder system as a means of journaling and at least this point am feeling kind of constrained by it. I’ve been playing with the device for a week and I purchased the Wee Worship book, forth incarnation, of liturgies also about a week ago. I have found both to be exciting and yet something that I fear.

I approached the voice recognition system because generally I’ve found that journaling electronically works best for me. Part of me is drawn into the idea of a nice pencil and journal book. But I find that composing electronically is more my style generally. It allows me to compose naturally and is a medium rich in retrieval elements. I’m also toying with the idea of putting this on a blog to include pictures and maybe some of the sound recordings as well .

So why was today difficult getting started? I started reading the preface of the Wee Worship book and it had a lot of practical ideas, ones that make a lot of sense both personally and in the context of a group. These liturgies were written for group, communal experiences, but I found that they are exquisite for his personal times of reflection as well. This is the first time that I’ve done the daily office and I am finding that the Wee Worship experience is probably going to be an amazing one. Why I am a bit reluctant; there are probably more reasons than I even know (opportunities for journaling in the future), but I’m finding that it’s the preparation that is of concern to me. It is an interesting phenomenon to prepare for a quiet time or other devotional time for yourself. The idea of determining what scriptures I will use and what hymns to be sung in being intentional about these things prior to the actual experience is new for me when it comes to you personal devotions. I don’t know why it is such a struggle given that I have a similar expectation for devotion and worship services that are communal in nature such as a Sunday morning service, a prayer service, or a Bible study. But in this case I found it difficult to spend the time to prepare.

So I started with the daytime liturgy of the daily office. Which is centered on Isaiah 35 talking about justice in the relationship of the believer to the poor. I found just in going through the liturgy for the first time that it was kind of exciting. It brought up prayers about humanity that, I’m embarrassed to say, but aren’t necessarily a big part of my prayer life. As a matter fact it is with great rarity that I pray for the homeless or those in poverty or other nations in the world for that matter. So in and of itself I’ve found this exercise to be amazing already even though it’s a little bit off putting the planning.

So at some point I want to talk a little bit about the parallels of approaching the daily office and moving to this arena of using the voice recorder and transcription software. I’m finding interesting parallels and I’m not sure if they’re real or just because I happen to be doing these things at the same time but I think they’ll be beneficial.